Notes for Azed 2,773

There are usually one or two points of interest in an Azed puzzle, and here we pick them out for comment. Please feel free to add your own questions or observations on any aspect of the puzzle (including clues not listed below) either by using the comment form at the bottom of the page or, if would prefer that your question/comment is not publicly visible, by email.

Azed 2,773 Plain

This puzzle is available at https://cdn.slowdownwiseup.co.uk/media/documents/obs.AZED.20251207.pdf

Difficulty rating: (2.5 / 5)

if this was Azed’s last puzzle, than it wasn’t a bad one to go out on; however, whilst the close of the year and the end of the latest annual competition would seem to be the perfect time for Azed to draw down the curtain on an extraordinary career and receive the send-off he so richly deserves, I fear that the timing would be less opportune for the Observer, as it slithers behind a paywall and needs as many juicy carrots as possible to entice readers to stump up their hard-earned beyond the four-week ‘trial period’. The inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the unsound clues which have made recent competition lists (including that for 2,772) and the missing or meagre Slips is that Azed’s powers are not what they once were, and it would be sad indeed if he were under pressure to produce ‘just a few more’ to cover the paywall transition. Gemelo has shown that, while he is not Azed, he is more than capable of taking over the role – including the clue writing comp – in its entirety.

This puzzle was, I thought, pretty close to the middle of the Azed difficulty range. It was rather lacking in sparkle, and a few of the clues were very loose by Azed’s standards – there were a couple which looked to me as though they might have been touched, or even crafted, by the hand of another.

Clue Writers’ Corner: Some nouns can be defined by one or two words which are not particularly interesting in themselves but can be integrated with the wordplay in an deceptive way that completely changes their sense (eg ‘bottom’ for SLADE) and often, between cryptic and surface readings, their parts of speech (eg ‘steal’ for BARGAIN). Other nouns don’t lend themselves to this treatment, the current competition word being a prime example, and here different approaches are likely to pay dividends. One of these possible approaches is to focus not on what the thing is, but on either what it does (eg ‘a big way to help circulation’ for SAPHENA) or what is done to it (eg ‘express tears over it’ for CROSSTIE). This month’s competition word may well be suitable for a treatment along these lines.

One point regarding this particular word: its first letter matches a single-letter abbreviation for a word which appears in the ‘straight’ definition provided by Azed (and in the Chambers definition). The word which is abbreviated, however, has no etymological connection with the competition word itself, so it would be entirely acceptable to use that five-letter musical term in a clue.

Across

4a Messy sops and so on at an end in covered bowl (9, 2 words)
An anagram (‘messy’) of SOPS is followed by a three-letter abbreviation that means ‘and so on’ and a two-letter adverb that has many senses, one of them being ‘at an end’ (“The game’s at an end”). The answer is (6,3).

14a Coarsest part of flax, unfavourable in the end (7)
A three-letter word for ‘unfavourable’ (or ‘ailing’) is contained by a word for a passage which rounds off a piece of music or, by transference, any other composition that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

18a Mould to fatten manure (4)
A triple definition clue that does feel a bit like, well, three definitions plonked alongside each other. The ‘mould’ is ‘the mould in which plants grow’, and the word least likely to be familiar is the one meaning ‘to fatten or ‘to feed on fresh-cut green food’ (it certainly wasn’t familiar to me).

24a Ruffians delivering last of beating and suchlike (4)
A five-letter word for ‘ruffians’ loses (‘delivering’) the last letter of ‘beating’.

25a Tidy skill shown in backing businessman (6)
A pair of three-letter words, the first being a (‘chiefly Scot’) crossword regular meaning ‘to tidy’ or ‘to put in order’ (it can also be spelt with the final consonant repeated, but that form is a lot less useful to setters), and the second being synonymous with ‘skill’, are reversed to produce the answer. I’d have to say that ‘shown in backing’ is at best a clumsy way of indicating reversal; it would be fine cryptically without the ‘in’, and the surface reading wouldn’t be seriously impacted.

32a Jail senior naval officer for corruption in Scotland (6)
A four-letter slang term for prison is followed by the usual abbreviation for ‘Rear Admiral’ (‘senior naval officer’), the result being an altered (possibly due to conflation with ‘maister’) Scots form of an extended English version of ‘sir’. Chambers suggests that it can be used when addressing people of either sex – shades of how Marcie addresses Peppermint Patty in the Peanuts strips – but Scots dictionaries don’t seem to support this. I’m very surprised to see Azed (i) using the indirect ‘senior naval officer’ for an abbreviation that is never used as a quasi-noun (in the way that, say, PC and PM are), and (ii) including a definition which is essentially no different to ‘American contraction’ for Y’ALL, in other words a definition completely unconnected to the meaning of the answer

34a Chap in group with uncle once conveying what amounts to an idea (9)
A three-letter ‘chap’ inside a three-letter ‘group’ is followed by the obsolete word for an uncle which enjoys an afterlife in the cruciverbal world more distinguished than its former existence within the kernel of the English language; this phenomenon (henceforth to be known as ‘obsolife’) seems to relate in some way to Saki’s observation that “abnormal vegetables and freshwater fish have an afterlife, in which growth is not arrested.”

35a Large Indian tree, a willow, not short (3)
A six-letter word for a willow has a three-letter word meaning ‘short’ (as a hedge or wall might be, height-wise) removed (‘not short’).

Down

2d Coin, not English – it was worth little abroad (4)
A five-letter word for a coin of any denomination is deprived of (one instance of) the usual abbreviation for ‘English’ (‘not English’), the result being what in India until 1957 was one sixty-fourth of a rupee. This was very little indeed.

4d Aussie narcotic? It’s served in a small cake (6)
The letters IT (from the clue) are contained by (‘served in’) the name of “a small cake of unleavened Indian bread, deep-fried and served hot”.

6d Institution, right to replace old black stone (6)
A six-letter ‘institution’ for education of either the primary or secondary kind has the usual single-letter abbreviation for ‘right’ taking the place of (one instance of) the usual abbreviation for ‘old’. I’m a little surprised that if Azed wrote this clue he didn’t use something like ‘second old’ instead of ‘old’.

7d Gardener giving off unpleasant smell? He was due to follow the chief (6)
An eight-letter word for a person skilled in the science of plants loses (‘giving off’) the two-letter abbreviation for an unpleasant smell produced by the human body, the abbreviation first being used, it seems, in a 1919 advertisement for Odorono (subsequently Odo-ro-no). This liquid antiperspirant was originally formulated by Dr Abraham Murphey to assist surgeons who suffered with sweaty hands, and was then marketed by his daughter, Edna. Sales were disappointing until the copywriter James Webb Young hit on a strategy which involved persuading women that sweating was an embarrassing problem which could well be adversely affecting their social – and romantic – lives. Ker-ching! The Pete Townshend song ‘Odorono’ on the album The Who Sell Out refers directly to the product. Incidentally, is ‘gardener’ the same thing as the eight-letter word here? I’m not convinced, since I think that you can be one but not the other, although perhaps it’s near enough.

21d Barley dish, mass in a fibre turned over (6)
The usual abbreviation for ‘mass’ is contained by a reversal (‘turned over’) of the letter A (from the clue) and a four-letter word for fibre, also the surname of the most famous literary character to have been killed by a falling bookcase.

22d Key, by the sound of it, for embroidery decoration (6)
A homophone (‘by the sound of it’) for the sort of ‘key’ that might be found off the southern coast of Florida.

26d Jock’s pet took a walk almost, climbing (5)
A six-letter word meaning ‘walked’, invariably with long steps, has its last letter removed (‘almost’) prior to being reversed (‘climbing’). The ‘pet’ is the sort exhibited by someone whom Walter Scott would have described as ‘gumple-foisted’.

29d Wagons feature? Guardsman shows this regularly (4)
Alternate letters from the word ‘Guardsman’ provide the answer, but the definition is pretty weak. The Wagon is part of a constellation with a name of which the answer is part. I wonder if the clue has been through a few iterations and ended up as neither one thing nor another.

(definitions are underlined)